Ric Shreves is a tech author, a long time Asia expat, an avid photographer, an amateur horologist and an opinionated pundit. He's hoping you've bought at least one of his books -- and loved it. (If not, it's never too late to try one!)

Mambo Community Back on Beat

This week saw the premier of two long-awaited resources for the increasingly active Mambo Open Source community: Mambo-Extensions.com, and Mambo-Manual.org Mambo Manual is a community-driven wiki project. The site provides assistance for users and acts as a supplement to the documentation resources provided by the Mambo Foundation. Mambo Manual is unique: This is the first time the Mambo project has had a wiki for community development of documentation and help articles. This has been requested many times over the years, but never implemented. The wiki provides a way for every Mambo user to contribute to the project. Mambo Manual is another step towards the goal of having the best and most complete documentation of any open source CMS — and to have it available in many different languages. There are currently well over 100 articles in the wiki, ranging from information for newbies to coding hints. The site also includes an excellent Glossary of Terms for Mambo. While the current contents are in English only, work has already started on translating the items into Dutch and Spanish. The project is built on the open source MediaWiki system and all content is free to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. While the site is being run outside of the Mambo Foundation, the manual has been gifted to the project and as long as Mambo is active, the wiki will continue to grow. The second site to launch this week was Mambo-Extensions.com. The Mambo community has, for a long time, been in need of a user-friendly directory of extensions for the popular content management system. While a large number of extensions exist, they are not kept in one central location, they are maintained to various levels, and they are sometimes a bit arcane in description. The lack of an easy-to-use resource for identifying which extensions are available, current and useful is a common complaint of users â€“ particularly those new to the system. The Mambo-Extensions site provides easy access to a central repository of information. With a simple hierarchical directory, the site collects and organizes Mambo components, modules, mambots and other useful tools into a logical structure that makes finding what you need a straightforward matter. Users are able to add new extensions, review and rate extensions and report extensions with problems. Links to downloads are provided for all extensions in the directory. The site is free of charge for registration and listing and is open to all extensions, whether Open Source or proprietary. These two new sites are evidence of a larger trend which sees the Mambo Open Source CMS community re-vitalized and increasingly active. The community has been experiencing steady growth over the last six months and is poised for a comeback from the brink brought about by a divisive fork in the GPL code set in the Fall of 2005. * Visit the Mambo help wiki at http://www.mambo-manual.org * Visit the Mambo extensions directory at http://www.mambo-extensions.com * Visit the Official Mambo Site: http://www.mambo-foundation.org